Great Reads For The Holiday

From Vietnam to chocolate, from dogs, wolves and opera to Lucas Davenport and Zapiro, we’re spoilt for choice when it comes to whiling away those long summer days.

- Patricia McCracken

1 COURTNEY’S WAR by Wilbur Smith with David Churchill (Zaffre, R320) Lovers Saffron Courtney and Gerhard von Meerbach are caught on opposite sides during the Second World War. As both are eager for action, there’s a very real risk at times that they might become direct adversaries. A gallop of a plot from start to finish.

2 THE BOYS IN THE CAVE by Matt Gutman (Morrow, R350)

One of the year’s news stories that transfixed the world was that of the Thai youth soccer players whose team-building exercise with their coach went dramatically wrong: they had to be rescued after spending days trapped in a flooded labyrinth of underground caves.

Los Angeles-based Gutman was one of the top international correspondents sent in to cover the drama, which combined nailbiting tension and creative, untested rescue techniques. Written in a breezy style and reflecting the ‘boys will be boys’ response Gutman found on the ground, this clarifies a saga that the rolling news coverage often fragmented.

3 VIETNAM by Max Hastings (William Collins, R395)

Former war correspondent turned renowned British newspaper editor and columnist, Hastings has often been tempted into longer forms of writing. His 26th book is testimony to this: it is more than 700 pages in length.

Hastings, who was born in 1945, the year the conflict began, was a White House correspondent in the late 1960s and arrived in the Vietnam war zone in 1969. By the time Saigon fell and the war ended in 1975, approximately two million people had died. The war dominated news for much of Hastings’s life, shaping a pattern of reporting for him. It covered the often bloody impact on the people living in war zones as well as the strategies of commanders both on the ground and on the other side of the world.